Do the ski gloves fit?

A smart article deserves a convenient title: The Kindle Swindle?

Hypothetically, I get a copy of, say, “The Inconvenient Truth”, and pay for the book. So, in an Ideal World ™ that pays for reading the book once. Every time I read it, I should pay for it as for a fresh book, since it’s a fresh reading. If I read it aloud, it becomes an audio book, ka-ching for that. If I flip the pages quickly, it becomes moving words and pictures (does that version have pictures in it?) — hey, I’m watching a motion picture — ka-ching! Retroactively, I browsed it a bit at the bookstore, so it was an exhibited piece as if at a museum (arguable!) and it’s a work of art (hard to argue against!). Museum tix? Ka-ching! Going forward, it’s on my desk, and I work with loose sheets (ask Murphy, he things a writing board give Tina Fey glasses run for the make-me-look-cool money) — so yes, your honour, I used the tome as a paperweight. Ka-ching! That time when I played ping-pong because it seemed handy? Ka-ching. If I pack it with me on a flight? Umm, isolate the book and the planet from the distractions and you can clearly see: “Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No! it’s a flying book!” Mind it, we’re charging for it only as a toy plane! Ka-ching!

Really, the guy who wrote this article “The Kindle Swindle?” might charge you as if it were a REAL aircraft.

Some sense churns out from the article though: the insecurity of the creator in losing control of the creation. The insecurity of an author from yesterday facing the very different technical reality of today. Current patterns of media consumption demand an updated business model which ensures at least one thing: if you’re having more fun with your books now, the authors should be getting more money. That’s not sophisticated at all, but this is not a problem that I’m tackling tonight, so next thought:

Newspapers are dying because free online news are killing them. Free weather information on websites so ad defaced you suspect their owners sabotaged themselves. Noble news should be free in a democracy. Propagation of opinion should be free. Ugh. I don’t want to tackle this problem tonight either, for lack of time not of interest.

Just the place to be shot by a feisty SLR-with-diffuse-flash toting photographer, who is proud that she takes pictures that the USCIS just won’t refuse:

Copley Photo a.k.a. Matilde’s Photo & Framing
441 Stuart St
Boston, MA 02116
(617) 859-8922

Other options that tried with shadow-behind-my-ear results:

• USPS
• Ritz camera
• CVS

*pssst, the price is even less than USPS’!
cl: passport/visa/OPT

Yea, that’s the big Question: What’s your contribution to humanity?

There’s the ski gloves gig. It kills me to think that it’s not a contribution to anybody but myself whenever I do make it. Just because it can’t go into a hearing aid some day. Or on an android. Why would an android want it anyway? To communicate with human pals. That’s after my next contribution to myself: linguistic evolution in a petridish of core2quads.

Why it kills me is not because I’m unsure whether it can get into hearing aids some day; but rather that it is not elegant. It’s like solving the problem without actually solving it. A muP dedicated to separating out speech? Give me a break. So the reason it kills me is this: I don’t have a silver bullet. I didn’t do the Sherlock Holmes act. Or the ICA act. I never had the “aha” moment. Except in tzvi’s class, or prakash’s class, or mike, or karl or naveen or …

Yea, that’s right. A contribution to humanity is either an aha moment, or nothing. (In technology at least. Outside of technology, of course, we expect you to make your contribution to the world around you.)

I could write articles for wikipedia too, that’s not much of an aha, but you bet it’s a contribution.

Or label some places on wikimapia, yea, your paternal village and your maternal village and wherever you’ve been.

Or post pictures on mustseeindia.com, lol, hey, rana never paid me to publicize it! Of course, we don’t want to see you, you or you in front of the mona lisa, gawddd, we dont’ want to see even mona lisa herself. So post pictures for places that need the exposure.

Or set up an enterprise. It’s a line of thought, you see.

But I tell you, I’m just living for that one nasty aha moment. Something like “we know the pitch is throwing a spanner in the works, I’ve got a way to take the spanner and bolt the works tight.”

It’s in Pegasus’ league.

• Convenient Statistics Why is it that after staring at the data long enough, the scaling factors turn out to be 1, the relative scalings get approximated by an exponential/gaussian, and the “obvious” connections get confirmed? But only after you stare at it a bloody long while!
• Hard Disk Advise To make an external eSATA solution, I got Consus external enclosure with WD 320GB disk (incarnated as Sphoorti at Ghatotkach). eSATA hot-swapping-in works like a charm on Ubuntu Hardy Heron 8.04, the disk is detected and dmesg reveals the device id. Mount it manually and you’re all set on SATA (verify with hdparm -t /dev/your-hd-device, should give you the promised 300MBps). Of course, I didn’t try hot-swapping it out yet. That’ll be when I graduate.
• Respect your microprocessor It’s a tool to assist thought not to circumvent it. Don’t run loops in vain. Fast processors are not an excuse for bad program design.
• The Intel Q6600 Microprocessor Ghatotkach, the giant son of Bheem, the Pandu prince of Mahabharata, is reincarnated as a quadcore machine at my desk, to run three instances of MATLAB for speech separation.
• Biodiversity for Statisticians Disappearing species means disappearing data. Yes, at some point in the future we can build them back from their nucleic acid structures, but for any bootstrap or cross-validation it would be nice to have a few original copies handy.

(more…)

Notice a nice spray painted skull on the wall of origins/greenhouse cafe block, passing by the harvard coop.

It’s the coop logo in disguise!